Newsroom

Defenders In the News

Pearl Yellow Hawk spent hours in the minus 13-degree sunshine watching bison burst one by one out of semi-trailers and into their new home. “My grandparents lived to see them go,” the 86-year-old Dakota Sioux woman said. “In 1883, more than 300 Assiniboine starved to death at Wolf Point after the bison were all killed. My grandmother lived through that. I’m glad the buffalo are back here again.”

A group of Yellowstone National Park bison is due to finally arrive at a permanent home on a northeastern Montana American Indian reservation on Thursday, almost a decade after they were captured and spared from slaughter. About 100 of the 138 animals were loaded onto trucks late Wednesday to travel overnight to the Fort Peck Indian Reservation, home to the Assiniboine and Sioux tribes.

A group of Yellowstone National Park bison is due to finally arrive at a permanent home on a northeastern Montana American Indian reservation on Thursday, almost a decade after they were captured and spared from slaughter. About 100 of the 138 animals were loaded onto trucks late Wednesday to travel overnight to the Fort Peck Indian Reservation, home to the Assiniboine and Sioux tribes.

Thirty million bison reduced to just 1,000 - 99.997 percent of all bison perished- a loss so great it staggered the imaginations of Americans in the 1880s. This near total annihilation of a native wildlife species left the Great Plains without wild bison for over 100 years. Saved from extinction through our country's first major conservation effort, its complete recovery and restoration to its former range remains elusive. This week, 139 healthy, genetically pure, wild bison will reclaim a small part of their historic home on the Great Plains when they arrive at the Fort Peck Indian Reservation in Northeast Montana on November 13.

For Suzanne Stone, an Idaho representative of the group Defenders of Wildlife, the cause was nothing less than a cry for justice. Wolves, Ms. Stone told a Retro Report interviewer, “belonged here just as much as the bison and the native people.”

Defenders of Wildlife and the Patagonia Area Resource Alliance are asking U.S. District Court Judge James Soto to void permission granted to Regal Resources Inc. by the U.S. Forest Service to drill exploratory bore holes up to 6,500 feet deep in the Alum Gulch area. The groups contend the federal agency violated federal laws and regulations by authorizing what has been called the Sunnyside Project.

Seen from the air, the Ivanpah solar project is both breathtaking and terrifying. In a valley just north of Interstate 15, near the Nevada border, close to 350,000 mirrors reflect sunlight toward three massive towers, which glow impossibly bright as they convert that sunlight into energy.

Gov. Sam Brownback’s plan for the state to raise and release lesser prairie chickens didn’t help his argument that Kansas should be trusted to protect the threatened species. It’s hard to be taken seriously when scientists are laughing. The plan, which Brownback announced last week, was quickly dismissed and mocked by biologists. And for good reason.

Research into nonlethal wolf control measures received a boost in Idaho with a $10,000 grant awarded to Defenders of Wildlife. The nonprofit conservation organization, which focuses on wolves, is putting the money--from the Christine Stevens Wildlife Award of the Animal Welfare Institute--toward a research project into a technology called "foxlights."

Interior Secretary Sally Jewell came to the Mojave Desert this September to announce a multi-agency effort to boost renewable energy development in the desert. But first, she had to go on a hike. “We went out into the Big Morongo (Canyon) Preserve,” she told reporters. “Fifteen, 20 minutes from here, there are wetlands. Wetlands, and 254 different bird species. Who knew?”